Age Of Innocence
by Juanita Dark
Summary: From Limbo to Eternity. [Spender]
1. Part I: Crestfallen

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AGE OF INNOCENCE  
  
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'"You see that elegant young man going into that fine, peaceful house: his name is Duval, Dufour, Armand, Maurice, or something. A woman dedicated herself to loving this spiteful fool: she is dead, she is certainly a saint in heaven, now. You will kill me as he killed that woman. That is the fate of us charitable hearts...'"   
A Season In Hell - Arthur Rimbaud  
  
...Across the pain-jerked body of the Night  
We must go, taking the new-born Death in arms,  
Holding it close, warmly to us, as our own,  
Giving it new games to play, new toys to tear apart.  
Tunisian Patrol - Richard Spender  
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[Crestfallen]  
  
He had come over the last dune and felt the vibrations of her presence across the wide emptiness. For once there was a sense of disruption to what had merely been an eternity of sand, fire and air. He judged that they were going somewhere this time - no longer the sightseeing of obscure days, years? (He hadn't counted the wild leaps of the blazing satellite, that he called a sun but probably wasn't). He had once, as he had suspected that it was all a by-product of a mind swollen and numbed in trauma. That had passed, now he simply accepted that he didn't really know anything anymore.   
  
That was why, when he stood there, on the sands of his time, on the shore of his memory - and knew she was coming for him, and knew what an insane quest that was - his heart broke a thousandfold, right there within his chest. Jeffrey Spender was dead. Long live Jeffrey Franklin Spender.  
  
The dusty air tore at his skin and his soul relinquished a tear to the ionized fingers of the coming storm. The wind flapped around him, and, despite its great height above them both, the awesome satellite passed into impossible darkness. Night descended and over the sharp endless rise of sand, a moon danced sublime; the earth cooling to a premature midnight as his companion and he passed into a cave on the frontier. A cave in the middle of nowhere, like an oasis in the middle of hell.  
  
The Companion had been with him from the beginning. He had called her then the Whore of Death. Men had seen her in war on the battlefield and to embrace her was to fall, her kiss was death. She had entered like a dementia, the solid halls of his reality, the squalid horror of the basement, *the* solitary figure in the room after his departed father: the man who had unquestioningly put his own weapon to his head and fired, speaking words of 'honour'.  
  
With her crazed, violet eyes and her dark lips, she had squatted over his bloody prostrate form and brought her tongue over his lips but once. Before his body, locking in seizure, had thrown him here. In limbo, where he was permitted to journey across the blazing sand to all places, and all things. To the beginning and the end.  
  
His eyes had gone blind for a moment against the preternatural daylight and she had put out a hand to steady him from falling into the steep, white drop below - a backdrop of endless desert nothing. He had mistaken the black material whirling around her for crow-coloured wings at first. The strands of her hair sucked in light, as they tore at the sky in a mad arc behind her - yet he couldn't see her face. He was borne into a fiery pit with confusion, disaster - helpless and half-blind. She had taken his defeated body up in her arms and swathed him, swathed him in strange cloth - he heard it flapping errantly in the updraught. He was lifted again and carried.  
  
How bizarre it had all seemed. That they had passed the stray columns of a long abandoned city and disappeared below into someone's crypt. Below the whipping of the sand above. He hadn't seen the sun set, but he knew that it had.  
  
In the darkness, a candle lamp was lit to consume the shadow and throw light across his companion's face. She, who took down the hooded shroud and revealed herself. He beheld the face of his amethyst-eyed, former partner, Diana Fowley. A bitter laugh had risen in his chest but got stuck, only growling ominously like a cough. He was truly in the land of the mad. What dreams are these, Jeffrey? The ravings of a mad man.  
  
But the voice that came from Diana soon sobered him. It sang the song eternal, the primal rumblings of the heavens. It was the permanent ending of all, that the seraphs would, in flights against the stars, use to split the planets.  
  
"You have been permitted," the voice imploded, "to see all things."  
He was not afraid to speak:  
"Why?"  
It was his own voice that scared him, its timbre, new and rich and strong. It was the strength he feared, the unbearable will to carry on. But this was not to be a conversation, and unlike the man he had been before, while he could laugh at the absurdity of what he now saw, he did not fear it. His acceptance passed into grace. He rose, a spirit on gossamer wings, soaring the flames of understanding, singeing his wings, falling, triumphing nonetheless. He knew he had to fall to rise again from the depths.  
  
Diana, with her eyes as mad as moonlight, touched him with a glacial hand. The lids of his eyes on fire.  
"Look." she said.  
And he saw.  
  
* * *  
  
They came and moved him in the night. Stole him away like common thieves. He had been in a hospital - the kind that free men use and bring their children with the lacerated limbs, the women with the first tremors of labour, their best friends with the accidents that shouldn't have happened. *He* was not meant to be there - and no record of him ever having been would be recovered.  
  
What stubborn vagaries of chance and irony determined he dare to live, without a prayer of regaining conscious independent thought? That he was lucky, or that he was a Spender? Who took bullets in their sleep and got up and walked like the dead men they were. His father had been here too - a 'murdered' man, bleeding into the carpet. The photograph, a crime scene curio. A picture of Samantha and Fox Mulder. Not of Jeffrey and Cassandra Spender. He smiled that the old man had at least a heart to be blown out of him. A man who had never been honoured had not the sentiment to betray. Yet, like his father before him, he refused to die.   
  
But 'they' would see about that. His body hurtling through space, under the screaming siren of an ambulance - an ambulance that, like him, was going to disappear. The only surprise was that she was there with him: his Lili, his lily of the morning. The one, who in haste and heat and uncertainty, he had loved. He alone had seen the mad, desperate fear that had risen, like blood, to her face and vanished just as quickly. She moved as silently and stealthily as did her partner - on orders. Except, that beneath the cloak of conspirital authority she had harboured for some time a dagger of hard, silent perfidy. The hour of her insurrection was nigh, and from there, there was little to come back to. He knew. Behold! his broken body.   
  
No state line had yet been crossed before his body was transferred into an unmarked van. The ambulance abandoned. The secrecy secured. Lili never left him, she and another called, Vansen, were to deliver him - for the last time - unto the tender audience of his father. And all the time she drove, her black uniform making her unequivocally pale in the dark recesses of the seat, her spine was fused with fear - for him - that she had come all this way just to watch him die. This time, not only he had noticed the harsh resolution of her gaze when, she, Vansen and the two others had settled him into the back. She had expected only a driver, not two. Maybe Old Smoky didn't trust her as entirely as she'd hoped. And while she might explain killing one, two would so surely sign her betrayal that she might as well load those two bullets into the back of her own skull.  
  
But that didn't stop her thinking about it. All the way there. Vansen looked at her again once. He had an inkling that she was going to turn but that was all.  
  
He was taken, of all places, to a sanatorium for the criminally insane. It was really a front for what had been the site of various experiments on random Americans unfortunate enough to be there. Experiments on the effect of attenuated strains of the alien 'black oil' virus. Given enough time, everyone grew murderous or really did go mad. Or both. He was put in a room, still machine supported. Until the great man himself would deign to see him. Lili was posted outside.  
  
He watched her in the hall. She was silent, her back to the door. He sensed the speechless desperation though no one else would have. Why was he so important to her? They had only spent one night together, hadn't they? And they had decided that it go no further than that. Then why was she here? He was out of the loop. What was he missing? Her lips moved in a slight tremor, like she was talking to herself. In a trance, for a moment she looked as if she was somehow aware. Of his watching? Of his questions? Or was it simply a marshalling of thought, concurrent with the arrival of his father?  
  
The old man was walking towards them with one of the other men who had accompanied Lili and Vansen - a man so blank he could be anyone and no one. His father arrived at the door and smiled at Lili. There was little sincerity in it. How could there be? He wondered how she did it, how she brought herself to work for him. Then he realised her reasons were probably no different to his own, not so long ago. You go along with it, you give it the benefit of the doubt for a time. Until you realise the doubt has no benefits and anything you hoped to learn or acquire is hopelessly out of your grasp or out of your depth. Yet, Lili had never felt the need to prove something to a man who had alternately discounted him, then dangled a carrot. Suddenly he realised that they, both he and his father had been playing off against each other in the stupidest sense. They had both wanted to be vindicated - in each other.   
  
The old man: as proof that his cause could be furthered - that it had merit and he, not Bill Mulder, had concluded correctly for the human race. Himself: if only to shake the sense of irresolution that had dogged him all his life. Ambition was, after all, the last refuge of failure. It was why, once, he had actually cared what his superiors thought of him. It was why he had hated the paranormal or being remotely different. Because, when it came down to it he didn't feel normal - never had - and he'd mocked himself long ago, hoping he could bury it and forget about it. Yet every single skeleton had come home to roost. Including his own.  
  
He had tried to outrun his own manipulation. He had tried to protect to his mother. But failed. He had assumed he understood the stage he was playing on, only to find the ramifications were above and beyond anything he could imagine. And then he made the mistake of the final assumption - that his father was capable of feeling anything other than the cold grasp for power and command. He, Jeffrey, had sold it on that one. His actions demanded a sacrifice - and his father was no Abraham. If only he'd had a clue that in colluding - even misguidedly - with his progenitor, he'd been dancing with the devil. Honour me, honour my memory. There was a fine line between fools and great men and he wasn't one to straddle it.  
  
His father entered the room where he lay, and asked Lili - only Lili - to accompany him. There was no slowness in his progress to the bedside, however, some immutable heaviness strained his movements. To give him some credit, the old man, habitually reaching for his pack of Morleys, had thought the better of drawing out the cigarette. The redheaded pack again retreated to the depths of the hidden black pocket. He took in the bandaged, swollen head of his son. The various wires and needles. The rise and fall of the respirator, and said, finally, in the quietest voice she'd ever heard him use:  
  
"Make sure...he's cremated."  
  
She, not betraying herself for a second, nodded. She moved to his bed, her fingers moving over the switches and dials, turning them of and down - one by one. She watched the ECG flat line, before turning it off. His father couldn't see how she looked - so very much in a dark place - a subtle tick of calculation unfolding in her, something inexplicable. She was turned away from him.   
  
And no sooner had every monitor, machine, wire and memory died in the room, then his father took his leave.  
  
* * * 


	2. Part II: Father Lucifer

PART II  
  
[Father Lucifer]  
  
Somewhere his heart pounded with a pleading impotence, thudded against the cage, and needle-like the mouth of nothing opened and sucked out his soul.   
  
My God. His father was a sobering experience.  
  
Part of him was out there, floating in the hall, following the old man's footsteps. Watching, as he walked, the withered hand seeking it's addiction, finally locating and drawing out the white cancerous stick. Bleached as white as bone. Lit and burning now in the darkness leaving behind bitter smoke and ashes. His father never looked so sane.  
  
He knew he could touch these thoughts, touch his father's mind and have it open to him, like a latch on a spring - but he did not want empathy or any other dimension to what he was seeing. The shock of his father's dispassion did not wane but seemed to aggravate a void deep within him. Perhaps even before a blazing shell had left its muzzle with a deafening bang, a dark universe had been born. It waited for him, from time to time it beckoned, but he was not yet ready to tap this world or to want to explore or realize it. But it had always been there - denied.   
  
Staring back at the room where his body certainly lay, he found he no longer wanted the experience. He only wanted to be still, perfectly still. And lost. Until he ceased to exist. Death.  
  
He came to with a sharp sense of nausea and discomfort. For a split second he felt the yearnings of something he thought he had lost - a body. Dry mouth, a tender twist of nervous energy all about his ribs that shifted away, ghost-like. Much like his mercurial partner. The Companion was gone. And his eyes not so much adapted to the darkness of their division - the darkness adapted to him.   
  
As if sensing the inopportune, the lamp before him went out with a mournful hiss. He knew she was up above somewhere, amongst the dunes. But he did not know who she was and what she was - and somehow now that seemed critical - to know her name, to know her words. As if the particles of the air were cleaving forth, parting into distinct identities, whispering his name. If his mind fought for clarity, questions would form; each question making the flesh move, until he was on his knees in the darkness, then on his feet becoming vertical, climbing: the dusty stairs giving way, with effort, to stone. A ceiling of stone, he realised. Had he not attempted to breathe he would have suffocated on his own fear - it was rigid, as was he - the minor panic was a many-armed thing holding him down and limiting him, the scavengers of dread trailing in its wake.   
  
Prometheus.   
  
The word offered itself, with no meaning. He called it in the darkness but found himself, for the moment, voiceless. He knew he was alone, and absolutely raw because of it. But fear was something to be danced to.   
  
Admittedly, he lost it. And like a current trapping him from the other side of the room, his body spasmed and flailed manically, hands scraping the walls above him, nerves screaming an unlearned rage, an unequalled despair. Poison.   
  
Pushing upwards he was free.   
  
The heat hit him first, then the sands and the air; but the heavens, the cobalt sky, harkened him to hope. Desperate, perpetual hope.   
  
After the claustrophobia of the crypt the sudden lack of enclosure was panoramic - and shocking. He almost retched - a sliver of the body-feel he had sensed before rising but not nearly so vaguely. It appraised him like a hand, not grasping, not holding, but touching, stroking, then gone - leaving him just as soon as it found him. Its withdrawal tingled the edges of the vacuum world within him, urgency snapping to fill it - roaring in his ears. Something was happening. For everywhere that caught his eye had momentarily blurred - everything was angry surfaces and madness. But why? Who had made it that way? His presence or her rescue? And which "her" was he referring to?  
  
He could see the pitted tracks left behind in her ascent up the nearest dune - up and away from their refuge - but why had she gone? He could only guess that if The Companion, like him, sensed the distortion in the environment - and she probably did more keenly he - she had gone for reasons of pure insanity. For a change was indeed there, indefinable yet mocking, roiling like some hidden imperfection.  
  
He struggled up the incline and tried not to be horrified by the sheer magnitude of her path. He simply pulled the cowls of cloth over his head and followed. It was the act of searching that reminded him. Déjà-vu. He remembered the atmosphere of wildness that appeared whenever his mother was cycling up to an "event". The way the cold hand would glide up his spine, fusing the bone together. God, say this wasn't about aliens this time. Say they hadn't invaded his soul, his heaven, his hell, and left him alone and faceless, wandering oblivion to the end of time.   
  
*  
He had lost track of time, and he had lost his way.   
  
The Companion's tracks were still very clear; yet, despite what must have been hours of movement, the satellite remained high. Time now burned and deceived, and hours had become totally unavailable to him. For he moved or seemed to move without getting anywhere, understanding merely that he was closer. But whether to some elusive target or to the borders of his own insanity, he knew not. He was bewitched and bewildered by the evil sand. As he approached the latest drift, only a spiritual exhaustion gave him reason to pause. So he lay, close to the apex, looking over, the sand offering little resistance to his weight, his hands sinking in the pale earth. In all his time here he had had no reason to feel tired, yet now he could barely support himself. Whatever he was approaching seemed to be drawing from him, as much as it was drawing him near. He felt it like magnetic north, pulsing and ebbing, luring.   
  
Suddenly, viciously, it amplified its entice in pure abandoned pull. Possibly, he cried out, his hands moving instinctively to his temples vainly trying to vent the pounding in his skull. Without warning the chaos reigned in on him.   
  
(Suppose it was not The Companion's tracks he followed? He had never seen her leave any. Had he?)  
  
His body caved, and he fell landing on his back. There was no true pain but on another level entirely he was in agony. He could not hear his own words or screams, if he had any, but felt the sand shift under his writhing body. Then just as rapidly everything, save his mental faculties, shut down. Involuntarily his mind's eye opened and he was still.  
  
Voices. Drifting over the dunes.   
  
(He felt himself tense, then tremble. His eyes were wide. On his back, half buried in sand, blissfully paralysed. But aware - for the first time he saw them.)   
  
Across the dunes the silhouettes of children danced. Far out their presence on the spine of one snake-like dune singling it out in all the arid nothingness. His fingers closed on the sand around him, mesmered.  
  
It was a lazy, carefree, tripping dance of two - a boy and a girl. Half-way along their progress the girl laughed and the boy, extending his arms, pretended to be a plane and flew, as best he could, like a winged locomotive, across the plains - with the girl in dizzy pursuit. The boy was clearly the older of the two and protective of his sister. How did he know? He knew. The information was part of the vision, like a dream is a function of the mind.  
  
(Lying there, he was literally in two places at once, places of the mind and places…places he could not explain. Psychology; Lili would know about that. He heard himself laugh and felt his face, almost despite itself curve into a smile. He was delirious. His smile reflected that delirium. Yet something was bringing him back to where he was lying, though, like a lucid dream, he could still access the running children on the sand.   
  
A shadow fell over his recumbent face. Another girl, God, yet another girl. Who were they all? Her long wavy brown hair was blotting out the sun. Her dress long ago had been expensive, yet she was drawn but determined, and her long brown limbs were lovely, all in conformity with her actual beauty. When she waved her hand before his eyes, he knew he could not respond.  
  
"I don't know you, do I?"   
  
The sound of an American accent in such close proximity should have been traumatic, should have jolted him to his feet, had he not been so convinced he was utterly, utterly mad. It did not matter, she responded to her own question.  
  
"Yeah, right. Creepy, half-dead, delirious guy could confirm that for me." But she did not seem too sure of herself. She looked around, seemingly getting her bearings. "The City is that way, right?" She jerked her head to her right.  
  
No answer came. As he knew it would not.  
  
She looked behind her as if someone were following. Then opened the parasol she had been holding, rested the cane on her shoulder so the shade extended broadly behind her head like a Technicolor aureole. For a moment it seemed she was going to reach down and check his pulse, but thought the better of it. Instead she stepped away.  
  
"Nice meeting you." Another step away. "Got to go." Two more steps "I'll put in a good word for you when I get there."  
  
She moved off. Yet the soft winds blew her voice back to him.  
  
"'I'll put in a good word?' What the hell was that all about?"  
  
He was not going to struggle to process this new element of hallucination. She was gone. And the other area of madness again dominated, swarming him with its mental picture, claiming him anew.  
  
The Children…)  
  
They ran and they ran, twirling about and each time they did he feared the steepness of the hills knowing something bad was going to happen and wondering why they seemed so oblivious to the danger. Then it happened. In all innocence the girl lost her footing (indeed she lost a shoe), and fell head over heels down the bank of the eddying sand colossus. "Jack" came tumbling after, pausing only to scream "Samantha!" before he leapt; so that it echoed around the queer, colourless desert like light refracted through a prism of pain - slicing like needles whomever they touched. The girl responded, her cry upwards a muffled cacophony- the words muted, then lost. Soundlessly the bodies continued to fall, downward, trained in gravity, disappearing. Vanished.  
  
Abruptly his mind's eye closed. He sat up as if from a nightmare.  
  
It seemed darker somehow. A diminished sun remained suspended against the sky. Again, he found himself scrutinising the emptiness, and felt an abstract pain, an abstract longing but chose to ignore both. The 'magnetism' was still there but receding, he could feel it drawing itself in to its source as if it were shrinking, retreating. Perhaps later it would renew its assault but for now he felt safe and strangely secure. Baffled at this otherknowledge, it was all he could do to simply steel himself against the speed of the falling preternatural darkness; finding as he did so that the satellite neither rose, nor fell, but was simply blotted out at night. The cold, like the veils of dark velvet and stars - was immediate.  
  
"God have mercy...", his voice quivered in its own audience and he licked his salty lips: "May God have mercy-"  
  
There was lightning.  
  
As if to respond in kind, the sky sparked. In a star-spilled night, without cloud, it was chastening. He held his tongue. But it did not stop. Vein after vein of the awesome hot energy arced and sliced the sky, followed - with logic - by thunder - horrible, bellowing displeasure. A storm. It was everywhere and he still could not stand, but far from fear now, the ragged beauty it inspired in the feral landscape fascinated him. Flashes of light everywhere, but not quite upon his position, yet it was coming, most definitely for that very spot. He could only marvel at the way the hills were alternately solarized and negatized as the furious power ripped across it. Finding the strength and will to move, he struggled to his feet and almost jumped out of his skin at the figure that had materialized beside him. He started. In the darkness he missed the proportions, mistook it for her. But then, another flash of light (disturbingly closer than before as the storm crept in a league about them) illuminated the features. A man.  
  
"Krycek!"  
His voice sounded dusty and hollow but no less loaded with invective and shock. Another spark, then loud, ominous growling thunder. He still could not see as well as he wanted, as well as he would have liked.  
  
"Look."  
It was simple yet succinct, and instantly deafening despite the storm. Krycek, the man, or thing beside him raised his arm and pointed - his *left* arm - towards the horizon. Following the line of his pointing finger, the vision raised a gasp. On the horizon the storm had intensified but instead of of lighning, there were great tornadoes of wind, sand and flame. They whirled against the sky-line blotting out all before him in a tsunami of roaring fire, and seemed to remain there unchecked; but as he understood it, it was only as the great distance would have it appear. The wall of fire was actually closing. The storm was its herald.   
  
He was horrified. Krycek remained unmoved, calmly lighting a cigarette, the lighter flame momentarily realising his features, like the encroaching lightning. He, Jeffrey, took in the two arms manipulating both cigarette and match, his mind forming a question, yet hearing his voice respond:  
"What is that?"  
"Dawn." Krycek answered, turning to face him.  
"I thought they cut off your arm?" Now he asked it, wondering whether the question would arouse anger, fear.  
Neither.  
"Nothing a little voodoo couldn't handle." The phantom replied, flexing the arm's muscle, quite unalarmed. "Aren't you glad you picked the right side?"  
"Perfectly."   
The lightning glared, as if dilating, and the face of the man next to him was clearer, bathed in light and free of cynicism, contemplating the sand at his boot.  
Again the impertinent questions:  
"What happened? Did they kill you too?"  
Krycek looked up now, holding his gaze with a penetrating, yet serious, indifference.  
"What do you think?" Same imploding tone.  
"No." His own voice was so small.  
Against the flaring light he saw the mad, violet of Krycek's eyes.  
"No." Krycek added, just to puntuate.  
"Why are you here then?"  
"I'm not."  
And strange as it seemed he heard a voice behind him whisper his name, and startled anew he turned away from his tormentor.  
  
Suddenly the desert world no longer existed.  
  
Another whisper, only slightly louder:  
"Jeffrey."  
  
The white light that fell on him was the light of the moon, and he was cold. So cold. A woman was coming towards him, and as she came into his field of focus the little details of the world around her became obvious. They were in a forest. Somewhere. It was her. It was Lili.  
"Jeffrey, you need to come back inside."  
Her voice was steady, yet plaintive. But somehow she talked to him as if he were a child. The shadowed foliage of the trees all grew around him. He felt...smothered...surreal. Where was he?  
"Jeff, it's me, Lili."  
He wanted to answer her, but this world was beyond him, and he could not seem to communicate. Speech did not come. Words did not form. He remained defeated in silence. Her hand crept to his shoulder. She seemed sincere and only a little...scared.  
"Jeff, we have to go home."  
But where was home?  
  
Chaos now. The world collapsed upon him. Thunder. The storm had come upon him while he slept; he was at its centre. Alone.  
"Krycek!" he screamed it at the burning air.  
The wall of flame had made half of its violent progress from between the horizon and him - and the lightning was everywhere at once. Slicing around him. And then, in one tumultuous stab, upon him. He felt himself, for want of a better word or feeling, ignite. His world became ubiquitous light and the sensation of sailing through the air came to him only because he was. Soundlessly gravity reclaimed him; he saw the sands above him and the stars beneath him, the former expanding triumphantly in his vision to strike him bluntly in the face. His mind went blank, and a million stars winked out one by one, the shrieking of the winds dulling to a vulgar, distant whistle.  
  
* 


	3. Part III: Sad Peter Pan

PART III  
  
[Sad Peter Pan]  
  
(Somewhere else. Sometime else.)  
  
...Her face was sad and the shadows obscuring one side made her look more so. His stomach making little leaps that died of vertigo before plunging down chasmically - several floors…   
  
(He felt broken.)  
  
…Her hair was out of place, their kisses, their kisses and embraces had crumpled their clothes and mussed their hair…  
  
(Why was he here? What was the meaning?)  
  
…Was he as strange to her as she was now to him? Was she as uncertain? He had a stolen condom and a horrible bulge in his pants, that hurt and goaded him by turns. And she, her nightgown, two top buttons undone, the third one missing…  
  
(His mind spasmed in the darkness and mugginess. This was…a memory. One he did not remember.)  
  
…She had just - a minute ago - stood and taken down her underwear, right in front of him. She hadn't raised the nightgown as she'd done it, so he'd seen nothing of her body, only its outline as the bedside lamp made the cotton glow transparently.  
  
"Lili." he said, helplessly, hopelessly…  
  
(A past he did not own, he could not challenge. For here he was just out of boyhood, and she, she was merely a child, barely a woman.)  
  
…She had touched him there, as their lips rubbed. She wanted to see it, to touch. Before he knew it, he was taking off his pants, worried that the palour of his legs might scare her. And he sensed she was afraid, he'd seen it as she had looked up at him as he lowered the elastic of his shorts. Curious, tumultous, beautiful fear. Curling in his belly - that he could unveil himself himself to her this way... Her bravery, her determination stretched like a pentangle around her until he felt almost invisible, turning to liquid gold under the first tentative pressures of her fingers. Did it hurt? A little...but...not...in a bad way. Her eyes were so dark, looking into them was like being swallowed. Her fingers withdrew and he felt them leave him, stripping away the special heat with them…  
  
(He did not know this place. This night was something he had lost in the fire of his youth. It was gone.)  
  
…He had been leaning back, the balance of his tactile body precarious at best. He saw her knees, the knuckles of her hands tight around the nightgown hem, as it raised and raised, revealing more of her strong, coltish legs than he had dared imagine. And as she wished, his hand wandered, crept up one leg before finding its way in between. He watched her expression. The way she now retreated from his darting kisses, a tautness enveloping her, her face a prison to the emotions of direct and personal torment, slipping on his thumb. Her slight shuddering, the to and fro motion, her hair the movement of willow in the winter. The dark passion on her skin, the warm cookie musk that he caught when she shared - quite oblivious now to his presence against her cheeks - the rise of her pulse (because his face was sliding, burying itself between her neck and shoulder). His hand retreated. She was so hot and sweet…  
  
(He resisted no longer. He let the experience wash around him, submitting. Sensing with his skin, feeling by osmosis. Then.)  
  
…She lay on the bed next to him while he grounded and prepared himself. Stretching himself, finally alongside her, the dark eyes he tried to avoid but couldn't help falling into. He spilled forward, another confused kiss, his hand, absently, nervously and accidentally closing over the smooth swell of her breast. Through the pleated material he felt the nipple harden against his palm. His heart was doing cat time, his position shifting to hover over her as her legs parted beneath him.  
  
He wasn't here, this wasn't happening. It was if his mind left his body and could only touch her by automation.   
  
He was on the edge of her. He felt he was crushing her quietly into the sheets. Her hand was there with him. It tried to guide. Was her bravery deserting her? She seemed so far away. His world tilted forward; he felt her leg raise and stiffen. He was so close, so close, and she was all resistance around him. Her voice jerked upwards, her body suddenly arching:   
"Jeff!" A plaintive whisper  
  
The word choked back by her sudden intake of air. She was breathing with him, her hand closing on his elbow. He sensed her pain and rode it terribly. Pushed forwards against her, through her, drawing back and then forwards against and into the tightness that closed in on him. Her voice again, but it wasn't a word. Her eyes were wild and lost and he wanted to comfort but couldn't seem to speak. Only the difficulty of saying her name, "Lili!", as it crashed out of him into gritted teeth. He drew back again, and then further forward so that the sensation of diving opened under him.  
  
Her leg twitched, stole against, then away from him. Her hips buckled and he unexpectedly rushed past the core of opposition that had hurt her so, hearing her say, "Oh!", in surprise but not feeling her relief. And he was mad and dazzled and still diving, the stave of stars beginning to burn below the line of his belly. She said "Oh!" again - not quite in pleasure, not quite in pain, the syllable getting thrown along into the rage of her breaths, like a hurricane building within her. And he, almost going blind, against the glow exposing the explicit lines of her features in the fire of the lamp and the blaze of his veins.  
  
"Uh.", her voice crushed against his ear. His cheek against hers, his face almost smothered by her hair against the pillow. His retreat and crash, rushing now like rain, thundering like the oncoming waves of all-conquering destruction. He could feel her emotion, struggling for ransom, that world a way below him, his overtaken by disaster and being imploded, thrown. Forwards, forwards...now in f r e e f a l l . Weightless.  
  
And where was she now, in this universe blown to atoms? She was around him, and everywhere and everything. Her body jagged, and closing in around him, her muscles first tentative sucking. Making her harden beneath him, then supplicant, then supine. Her heart riding the tiger that roared in her blood - played out in her gasping for air. He was softening inside her, now pulling away. Her. Still, despite, the insane tattoo of her pulse. The dark eyes clear and unseeing. He remembered he had hurt her at first. And she, how did she feel? Bruised? Too dismayed to move?  
  
The odd, filled package came off in his hands. He had an ignoble and depraved desire to be inside her again. He lost himself for a minute and was surprised that she had moved and was stirring to sit next to him; her hair hanging, dishevelled and gypsy over one shoulder, the other bare where the nightgown had become asymmetric. He felt so lost on the edge of the bed. He noticed the vague facial twitch as her hand hovered over her stomach. Yes, she felt torn, maybe a little dazed, it was natural, for the first time. She would feel him for mornings afterwards until she was healed and freed of the discomfort.  
  
"Did I hurt you?" he asked, wounded.  
"I'm...ok." She didn't sound quite convinced.   
Then she said: "I think, I love you, Jeff."  
And he, he turned to her and said:  
"I love you too."  
He disposed of the plastic, dressed and cradled her against him. He stayed until hours before dawn with her, where they slept facing each other half sleeping, half dreaming-touching. There was the light salty kiss as he climbed down from her window. The way the night drew in as much as it could for its last moments - stars in the heavens throwing down their lights from far and foreign orbits. Him waving goodbye from a distance.  
  
The next day she was gone - excised from his life on the base. He tried to hold on to the memory, discover what happened beyond his saying goodbye. Vainly. The desert was coming back to him, slowly and searingly.   
  
He could not shut out the sight. 


	4. Part IV: Window To Your Soul

PART IV  
  
[Window To Your Soul]  
  
He did not want to open his eyes but it seemed unreasonable not to; the meeting borders of starred skyline and dusty hills were unmistakable - appearing to him suddenly - as if his memory of lost love had only been a slight derailment in his train of thought. Now he despaired of ever understanding, ever grasping the significance of his time in this limbo. For the most part it had been a time almost entirely spent on his back. And a small trickle of horror crept in, intimating that possibly he was still dying. These were the last beats of his heart, obscured in the darkness of that squalid room after his father's departure; or worse still he had never arrived there but was simply, at this moment, bleeding to death on a basement floor. His life merely flashing before his eyes.  
  
Reduced to the humiliating, his back to a wall of mounting confusion, he cried. Unable to stop his pain he felt the rising sobs wrack his upwards until his body visibly shook. Unmanly, perhaps? But he felt anything other than a man. Not someone who had had a life that amounted to anything. Help and hope, those Siamese muses, had finally deserted him and he could only curl into a ball against the sand and wait for the inevitable. Ha, he had mocked his father as the gun had rose to target him:  
  
I'll kiss my mother in hell and you'll *still* be in a lower place.  
  
Blasphemous to his mother's memory, yes, but perfectly appropriate to the occasion. He was being excised, cut away, like a right hand that pollutes the blood. It did not matter that he was his father's only son. He blanched. Surely he was not naïve enough to believe his father had remained faithful to his mother - the golden calf of The Project after decades of separation? Surely he was not naïve enough to believe he was his father's only son? He imagined them, these ghost children, sparkling across the globe, seeing strange white lights in their dreams, waking up screaming. He did not matter; never had.   
  
He lay fallen; small, crippled and blasted, his face half-smothered against the sands, blinded by his own tears, his back facing the west, knowing the advancement of what he knew not. A closing crescent of fire, intense to a degree that flayed his back, singed his hair, carbonised the air before it left his lungs. A fiery apocalypse that he would never see arrive. Whatever had held back the tears before was now furiously swept away. In his heart he had cried in the netherworld of the basement when he waited for nobody to come. In his heart he had cried when he knew his mother had been immolated, burned to death, and he had been an instigating party. In his heart he had wept when he knew he was beyond redemption because he would never forgive himself. And now his heart was broken and he could not stop the flow of everything he had for years shut out; no more than he could stop the unquenchable force behind him that blazed remorselessly, turning the ground to glass.   
  
For it was hell, and it had come for him. He had invited it. The fire was for him. A star dense with souls in eternal misery and pain. And all he could think was that he missed his mother, that he should have been there.  
  
Had he not felt the depth of this pain resonate in him so profoundly, he would have been paying attention to the ripples in the atmosphere. Another presence. That irresistible magnetism he had felt, the one he had unconsciously moved towards, except now it's immediate re-appearance seemed to draw unnatural sound from the very burning air. A rhythmic, undying sound that bristled with anger, and sheer vigour of opposition - not towards him but the creeping hell behind him.   
  
Yet she rose, from the earth, from the sand, from thin air it seemed, and instantly she declared war.  
  
Though he was mortified, by his tears, by his weakness, as he saw it, to even dare to cry, he could be watch as he saw the figure coming towards him, dark and slender, loosely cloaked, determined in its ascent up the bank where he lay. The very movement of her musculature matched the preternaturalism of her pace. The way she continued undaunted when he knew what she must have faced. The Companion climbed onwards.  
  
In a moment she had reached him, and then stepped over and beyond him, disappearing from his view for only a second before crouching at his side and shifting him, pulling him protectively against her body - which soft and rich, coursed with unknown strength, seeming to leak its magic into him by its mere proximity. She wiped the sand from his face, while he could only look helplessly upwards, beholding her human face without the veils and the masks.  
  
"Jeffrey," she breathed it, and the incredible sympathy of her face moved him beyond words. Her sadness at seeing him broken so - for it seemed, in that moment, a wordless empathy had passed between them and he knew that she understood the meaning of defeat - true defeat.   
  
Her black eyes shone with anguish, blacks strands (or braids, or neither) flailing in the winds, dark brown skin - an ageless, beautiful chameleon of a girl - and an otherearthly spirit. Like the daughters of the Pharaohs that bathed in the Nile. The winds were whipping now, tearing at them, making him feel naked and defenceless. He could see the wall of fire was no longer a crescent but had closed behind them creating a perfect circle of wrath. Still she held him with a posture of immutable resistance to the danger that threatened them both.  
  
"What is it?"   
He knew he had asked it without thinking, totally in reaction to the whirring flaming pillars that were mesmerising to watch - if he allowed himself the luxury of detachment. His voice was lost subsumed by the terrific roar of the things - not molten walls but living ethereal, lethal flame, not so far as a block away and closing fast. In the midst of the twisting sands, the raining fire, the rumbling, he suddenly understood. The ring of fire was sentient. It was talking to Her, for he felt her physically stiffen. And he understood that she was answering, fighting its persuasion, limiting its influence - refusing it - despite him not hearing a word. But she could only persevere for so long, of the two, this inferno boasted the greater power. And yet, and yet, she fended, she fought.  
  
His body was healing, strengthening, and reviving he faced the flaming whirlwind. He could not penetrate its exchange with The Companion, but as much as her face hardened with resolve, something in her was crumbling, her eyes darkening as much with contempt as with fatigue. And he wondered again what he was actually witnessing.  
"Death." she answered, only to cry out suddenly, reaching for her arm - blood welling between the fingers.  
  
He heard the great fire laugh in gluttonous anticipation. The Companion seemed to wilt, a million emotions making themself plain, as she turned now to face him. He could only babble foolishly, "Let it take me." while reaching for her wound, truly beyond any natural resource of courage, but finding it anyway. Awash with a sense of finality, they both faced the fire, together, and standing in each others arms, he did as she and closed his eyes. He felt her focussing, marshalling her strength, though he did not understand it and wished that somehow he could protect her.  
  
But the wind picked up - really picked up - swirling around them, forming a barrier of hurricane and sand and he, in awe and fear, could not speak, only squint against the grit and intensifying light; feeling their bodies impossibly crushed in the narrowing space - the world spinning round and round. The fire roared, furiously, trying to find a way in. But the light was becoming so unbearably bright, he had to close his eyes again or be blinded - only to discover this offered little to no protection. Fear came upon him again - and he felt it and hated it. The Companion's arm slipped about him, a hand covering his eyes. The last thing he heard were her words, not resigned, not afraid, lethargic, calm and concentrated:  
"Sssshhhhh."   
  
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  
Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither  
- Oscar Wilde  
  
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  
  
  
TO BE CONTINUED IN: The Red Dream 


End file.
